Danger In Amish Country. Marta Perry
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back to the kinner,” he said shortly. “I’ll see what’s happened.” He didn’t take more than a few steps before realizing that Teacher Sara was right behind him. He swung around, exasperated. “I said—”
“If someone is hurt, it’s better we both go. Then one can stay with the injured person while the other runs for help.”
A look at her stubborn face told him arguing would do no good. Heaven preserve him from a headstrong woman. Not wasting his breath, he ran toward the creek.
“This way,” she said, panting a little. “Stepping-stones.”
He nodded and veered after her as she headed downstream. No doubt the teacher knew the area better than he did. If the man was injured badly enough to need a stretcher, she’d know the best way for emergency workers to get to him, as well as the closest telephone.
And if it was worse? He didn’t have a clear line of sight now, but that dark form had been ominously still. Well, he’d tried to protect Teacher Sara from going. If she saw something bad, it was her own fault.
She was already starting across the stream, jumping lightly from one flat stone to another. He followed, but when they reached the other side, he took the lead again, brushing through the undergrowth toward the base of the cliff.
They broke through into the pebbly scree at the bottom of the cliff. Any hope he’d had that the form was an animal or fallen log vanished.
Sara reached the man first. She dropped to her knees, her skirt pooling around her, and put her fingers on his neck. Caleb could tell her that she wouldn’t find a pulse. No one could still be alive when his head looked like that. The poor man didn’t have a chance.
Moving quickly to her, Caleb took Sara’s arm. “Komm,” he said, his voice gruff. “There’s nothing you can do.”
He helped her up, eyeing her face. If she was going to faint on him... But though her normally pink cheeks were dead white, Teacher Sara seemed to have herself in hand.
“Poor man,” she murmured, and he thought she was praying silently, as he was.
“Do you know him?” He drew her back a step or two, keeping his hand on her elbow in case she was unsteady on her feet.
Sara shook her head. “Englisch,” she said unnecessarily. If the man had been Amish, she’d certainly have known him. “He looks fairly young.” Her tone was pitying.
Young, ya. The fellow wore jeans and boots, like so many young Englischers. Dark hair, with a stubble of beard on his chin. He looked... Caleb sought for the right word. He looked tough. That was it. Like someone you might not want to get on the wrong side of.
But they couldn’t stand here wondering about him. “It doesn’t seem right to leave the poor man alone. If I stay with him, can you see to calling the police?” Amish usually tried to steer clear of entanglement with the law, but their duty was clear in this case.
“Ya.” Sara took a step back, away from the support of his hand. “There’s an Englisch house not far. They’ll have a phone. And then I’ll stay with the kinner.”
“My Rachel.” His gaze met Sara’s. “You don’t think she could have seen this?” He gestured toward the body, his mind rebelling at the thought of his little girl viewing anything so gruesome.
“No.” Sara seemed to push the idea away with both hands. “I don’t think... Surely he hasn’t been lying there since yesterday.”
“It’s possible.” He looked up at the cliff face above them. From this angle it just looked like a jumble of rocks. “If she was standing where we stood...” He stopped, looking at Teacher Sara accusingly. “You shouldn’t let the kinner go so far from the school.”
“It is the edge of the playground,” she said, a touch of anger like lightning in her green eyes. “The scholars are never out of my sight when they have recess.”
“Sorry,” he muttered.
He shouldn’t blame Teacher Sara, when the thing that troubled him was his own inability to get his child to confide in him. Rachel had been so distant and solemn since her mother’s death, as if all Rachel’s laughter had been buried with Barbara.
“I’ll go now,” Teacher Sara said, turning away stiffly.
He let his gaze linger on her slender figure until the undergrowth hid her from sight. No matter how long this took, he knew instinctively that she would stay with Rachel. She’d attempt to comfort his little girl.
But if Rachel really had seen this man lying dead... His thoughts stuttered to a halt as something even worse occurred to him. What if his little girl had seen the man fall?
TWO
“I’m not sure what else we can tell you, Chief O’Brian.” Sara tried not to think how odd it was to see the bulky, gray-haired township police chief sitting behind the teacher’s desk in the Amish schoolhouse. “Neither of us knows who the man was.”
She and Caleb were perched atop the first graders’ desks, which were, of course, the row closest to her desk. It was not exactly comfortable, but she kept her hands folded in her lap and her feet, in their sedate black shoes, together on the wide planks of the wooden floor.
Chief O’Brian, benevolent and grandfatherly, had guided the small police presence that covered both the village of Beaver Creek and the rural township since before Sara was born. He consulted the notes he’d been making and then looked up at her.
A girlish giggle floated in from the porch, distracting him. Lily and Lovina were teaching Rachel how to play jacks under the observant gaze of a young officer. Sara felt sure that the giggle, coming from Lily, was for the benefit of the policeman.
She’d chide the girl, but she was too relieved that they were well screened from the efforts under way across the creek, where the emergency crew was removing the body.
“Well, now.” Chief O’Brian returned to the subject at hand. “I think there’s just one thing that’s not quite clear to me, Teacher Sara. Why exactly were you and Mr. King out there looking at the ridge to begin with?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but Caleb beat her to it.
“My little girl was telling me something I couldn’t make heads or tails of about an old man,” he said. “When I picked her up after school today, I asked Teacher Sara about it. She showed me the way the rock outcropping looks like a face in profile.”
“Caleb and his daughter are new to Beaver Creek,” Sara said, although she suspected that the police chief, like the Amish bishop, knew all there was to know about newcomers. “You know how the kinner talk about that face they think they see in the rocks.” She turned to Caleb. “Chief O’Brian visits our school several times a year. He teaches the scholars how to be safe when they’re walking along the roads. And brings them candy canes at Christmas, ain’t so?”
Chief O’Brian’s lined face relaxed in a smile. “Visiting the schools is my favorite part of my job. Not like this situation.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the ridge.
Caleb’s explanation had made it sound as if Rachel’s questions about the old man were mere curiosity. No doubt he was relieved that the chief had moved away from the topic.
“I’m sorry for the man’s family to be getting news like this,” she said. “Do you know who he was?”
“Not yet,” Chief O’Brian said. “So you folks were just looking over that way out of idle curiosity, is that it?”
Apparently he wasn’t ready to move away from the topic after all. Sara glanced at the poster above the chalkboard, which proclaimed Visitors are the sunshine in our day in cursive letters.
She could practically feel the intensity of Caleb’s will directed toward her. For whatever reason, he didn’t want her to say anything